Chapter 2 - Woburn: Summer 1966

Woburn was a city of thirty-six thousand situated twelve miles north of Boston. Its first
commercial enterprise had been a tannery, built by the Wyman brothers in 1648 and it
was followed by one tannery after another till the city was nicknamed as Tan City. In
1853 Eatons Chemical factory was built in northern Woburn, along the banks of the
Aberjona River, supplying chemicals to the tanneries. The chemical factory was known
as the largest chemical plants in the country. By the end of 1960s, the tanning industry
in Woburn had been eclipsed by competition from abroad and Eatons Chemical
factory was taken over by Monsanto. W. R. Grace, another chemical giant, which built
a small plant on land that had once been an orchard.
Anne and Charles Anderson moved in Woburn in 1965 and it was when the people in
east Woburn had started to observed that there was something unusual about the
water. The moment of change began when wells G and H went online and began
pumping water to serve homes in the east of Woburn and, to a much lesser extent,
those homes in the north and central sections. Wells G and H had been periodically
shut down and opened due to the complaints that bombarded the City Officials
pertaining to the odor, rust-colored, and strong chemical taste of the water. The wells
were permanently shut down in 1979 when half a miles from the said wells, 184
barrels of industrial waste were found to be dumped on a vacant land northeast of
Woburn. Both of the wells were tested and found to be heavily contaminated with
several suspected carcinogens, including trichloroethylene, terrachloroethylene and
three other contaminants all of which are used as industrial solvent.
Back in the winter of 1972, Jimmy Anderson, the youngest child of Anne and Charles
Anderson was diagnosed to be suffering from acute lymphocytic leukemia. Through
neighbors and Bruce Young, Woburn Trinity Church reverend, Anne discovered more
than a dozen cases of children living in the small town of Woburn, Massachusetts were
afflicted with Leukemia. The notion that each case shared some common cause began
to obsess her. She thought that only the water and the air were the two things they all
shared. She confided her observation to Dr. John Truman who was at first reluctant to
accept her suspicion but eventually referred her to Dr. Clark Heath of the Centers for
Disease Control, which eventually led to the investigation of a possible leukemia
cluster.
Bruce Young, through the aid of Donna Robbins whose son died of Leukemia in 1979,
invited the other parents whose children either died of Leukemia or were suffering from
the same afflictions, to consult Joe Mulligan, a Boston lawyer. Mulligan, upon knowing
that that twelve children, eight of which living within a half-mile radius, and six of them
living almost next door to each other, were all with Leukemia and contaminated
drinking water, gave a remark that the case is almost res ipsa loquitur, a legal term
which means the thing speaks for itself. They signed his firm to a contingency contract
to pursue a suit against anyone responsible for the contamination of the local wells.
Jimmy Anderson died in 1981 but several other deaths in Woburn had occurred since
1972 and all these children suffered the same fate. In early 1981, the Center for
Disease Control issued a report on the Woburn cancer cluster that showed the cancer
rate was at least seven times higher than normal, but did not definitively connect the
well contamination with the leukemia cases.